Susan Elizabeth Rice (bornn November 17, 1964) is an American public official who served as the 24th U.S. National Security Advisor (2013-2017).

Quotes

• I was blessed by parents who had come from pretty limited, modest circumstances, and had risen to the top of their fields. My father, in the field of economics, became a governor of the Federal Reserve. My mother coming from Jamaican immigrants to Maine, rose to be a leader in the corporate world, and a person who was known as the mother of Pell Grants. So I was blessed to have parents who taught me from a very early stage that I could do what I set out to do. And while I lived in a society, you know, having been born here in Washington in the 1960s, where clearly racism and prejudice were a major factor, they taught me in a very unusual way not to allow that to diminish my own sense of self. So whether I was a rare minority in a predominantly white elite girls school here in Washington D.C., or at Stanford or Oxford where I did my graduate studies, I was accustomed to not being in any way oblivious to the fact that I was a minority. I was very conscious of that, but I didn't allow it to diminish my sense of worth and my sense of commitment to doing my best…
  • On knowing her minority status in “Susan Rice Talks Of Balancing Career And Motherhood, Reflects On Benghazi” in NPR (2019 Oct 7)

• Well I was concerned, back even at that early age of not quite 28, that as an African American woman entering the field of national security and foreign policy for the first time, that if I accepted a job in African policy at that stage without having demonstrated my ability to work on a wider range of issues, I feared, I think legitimately, ... that I might well get pigeonholed in Africa. That people in this predominantly white national security establishment would see me as black working on Africa — and therefore not capable of, or suited to do, anything else. And I made that choice. Looking back on it, it was quite a bracing thing to do to turn down at that age a substantive policy job.
  • On her attempts to avoid being pigeonholed in her career in “Susan Rice Talks Of Balancing Career And Motherhood, Reflects On Benghazi” in NPR (2019 Oct 7)

• I was close to President Obama and he was a target…I'm an African American woman. I don't take crap off of people. And I'm confident in my own skin… Putting all that together, put it in a political context of the campaign, and maybe I was an attractive target.
  • On being targeted for sharing intel about the Benghazi attack in “Susan Rice on Trump, Benghazi and motherhood: ‘Maybe I was an attractive target’" in CBS News (2019 Oct 10)

External links